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Artist statement in 2014

                                                                Approach and process

 

"Entrée en matière" my new commitment was first used the matter (Berlin, 2012). A need, a necessity to express: by kneading, projecting, by spreading, by breaking - this material, created based on cement, sand, glue, wood particles.  Rejecting brushes, with bare hands, in immediate contact with the support (the pasted canvas on wood), I was expressing a vitality, violence, a desire also. Act of 'doing' versus the idea. This reaction - gross - this throw outside of oneself, as well as the cutting edge against the smooth, polished, to the decorative; Perhaps, suggests the need for breaking and emancipation, in the face of the shackles of the multiple footprints on individuals.

After the stage of deconstruction consecutive to the abandonment of the figurative, can also be seen this material as first element. The claw, the trace, the footprint as originally of the furthest art. As if he had unconsciously in again after the tabula rasa.

Conscientiously avoid any seduction, ease, this experiment made me choose only two letters: white and black. An exercise imposed on the one hand avoid the flatterer of colouring, and on the other to measure the holding of the piece, without artifice and with this constraint.

The walls of the white cube, who welcomed my first exhibition allowed me to see more clearly (as in the framework of the workshop) what was and what was not, and which, to my surprise: revealed unconscious influences of artists of yesterday. I got so works, and to have destroyed others, who had yet taken the validity of the workshop. I presented also two sculptures, free and slender and dealt with the same material as the other works, and a polyptych facility surrounded by sand.

Second step: ' Triad of colors: Red, Black, White.

It is in October 2013, three months after this exhibition, I decided to introduce an extra color: red. And leave behind the constraints of the previous medium, to return to the free Web. With similar gestures, I projected the acrylic with my loaded fingers of a painting that is sometimes mixed with water. The Protocol of as previously to act with the same intensity (and sometimes his eyes closed) but in one sitting, without the possibility of return to work then. 

This struggle with the elements (not new since practice used to this confrontation in the past, including outdoor experiences), the challenge is in a domination of matter, as to the acceptance of the partial random encounter This fine in practice. Because even if the exercise is spontaneous and unconscious approach of the Act, the practice, is a result of the memory of the hands themselves. All an intense and diverse experience through gesture. The artist, body, no conscious memory, is part of this process, though even he is truly devoid of intention, and habitus.

It is to create extract, with the hope that making the material to arm the body, will offer a plastic moving and I hope: perfectly poetic. A dynamic expression that questions us.

                                                                  

                                                           JMB BARRE, (Paris, February 26, 2014)

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